All 6 Uses of
profess
in
Jane Eyre
- This passion Celine had professed to return with even superior ardour.†
p. 165.3 *professed = claimed
- She had obviously not heard anything to her advantage: and it seemed to me, from her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself, notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached undue importance to whatever revelations had been made her.†
p. 225.5
- I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say, — 'I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do.†
p. 233.1professes = claims
- Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled.†
p. 307.8professed = claimed
- — no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word — the thin partitions of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.†
p. 355.2
- Of Mr. Rochester's character I know nothing, but the one fact that he professed to offer honourable marriage to this young girl, and that at the very altar she discovered he had a wife yet alive, though a lunatic.†
p. 439.1
Definitions:
-
(1)
(profess) to claim or declare -- often insincerely
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Much more rarely, profess can mean:- to teach or be knowledgeable of -- as in "profess chemistry"
- practice as a profession -- as in "profess medicine"
- proclaim belief in or allegiance to -- as in "profess Catholicism"